Al-Awda New York, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, is part of a NYC-wide coalition urging New York City Council members to cancel their planned trip to the apartheid state of Israel. Al-Awda is one of numerous organizations in NYC and nationally who are calling upon these members to decline an all-expenses-paid trip to Israel, scheduled for February 2015 and sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York and United Jewish Appeal, which inaccurately claim to speak for the Jewish community.

In particular, members of the Don’t Go coalition have highlighted the collaboration between the NYPD and Israeli security forces that have shared intelligence and surveillance techniques in order to suppress communities of color, including the massive targeting and racist oppression of the Black community as well as the targeting of the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim communities in New York and the ongoing occupation, apartheid, dispossession and massive racist violence and massacred against the Palestinian people in occupied Palestine.

In addition, Palestinian civil society inside and outside Occupied Palestine has called for a boycott of the Israeli state, including such trips sponsored in conjunction with Israeli officials. Such trips are propaganda exercises meant to market the dispossession of the Palestinian land and people on an international level and provide international cover for the construction of settlements, denial of Palestinian refugees’ right to return, home demolitions, mass imprisonment, occupation, apartheid and the massacre of thousands this summer in Gaza. In line with the Palestinian call for BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions), we also demand the cancellation of this trip.

Fatin Jarara of Al-Awda will participate in a press conference at City Hall on Monday, January 12 at 12 noon urging the immediate cancellation of this trip. We urge you to attend the press conference and participate:

As pressure mounts against racism and militarized policing in our country, we are outraged that the City Council has decided to tour Israel, an apartheid state and one of the global centers of the military/policing industrial complex.

We are a diverse coalition of concerned New Yorkers and grassroots social justice groups, including Jewish Voice for Peace, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, the Direct Action Front for Palestine, among many others.

Join us at a press conference on the steps of City Hall on Monday, January 12 at 12 PM to announce our campaign to pressure City Council members to cancel their trip to Israel